PageLines recently updated their awesome WordPress theme iBlog to iBlog Pro 3. I am currently using the theme and absolutely love it.
iBlog Pro 3 is a premium WordPress theme that is designed for Apple lovers and is a clone of the widely admired Apple website. It is easily customized and well documented. iBlog Pro 3 costs $75 and can be scooped up at: pagelines.com/themes/iblogpro/.
After reading about Authorize.net’s fun holiday weekend adventure of a fire in their data center, I decided that I better find a solution to automatically backup my servers data and database dumps to an off-site location just in-case the unthinkable ever happened.
Basically what I have is full drive images taken weekly and daily MySQL and Microsoft SQL database backups that need to be stored off-site. I have known about Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for months but it is difficult to setup and requires custom coding and integration via their API. Also, all this gibberish of AWS key, AWS hash, AWS username, and such just flustered me. I also caught wind of Mosso Cloud Files which is a service by RackSpace. While Cloud Files looks very promising on its own, it again requires API integration to automate the backup process.
There must be an easier way? Then I stumbled across Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk combines the power of using Amazon’s respected infrastructure and reliability, but packages everything into a nice and easy GUI and web interface. But Wait… That’s not it… Order today and you also get full integration with Rack Space Mosso Cloud Files as well. Sorry, that was my tribute to Billie Mays.
Jungle Disk allows you to create disks of either flavor; S3 or Cloud Files via their beautiful ajax rich web interface. Also through the web interface you can create additional users and assign them permissions to disks for $2 per month per user extra. Then simply using their client applications you can push files to the cloud. Their client applications are available for almost every popular operating system; Windows, OSX and Linux.
The one thing Jungle Disk does not do is double as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). All files pushed to Jungle Disk are private and cannot be accessed by the public internet. If you need CDN capability Jungle Disk is not your solution, try Amazon’s CloudFront instead. Unfortunately, CloudFront requires API integration and all that gibberish I spoke about above.
The cost is $2 a month base ($2 for each additional user) and a pay for what you use model. Amazon S3 storage is $0.15 per gigabyte and data transfer is $0.10 for uploads and $0.17 for downloads per gigabyte. Rackspace Cloud Files is also $0.15 per gigabyte storage and bandwidth is currently unbilled. That’s right, free bandwidth when using Mosso Cloud Files.
Jungle Disk was absurdly easy to implement and the only complaint I have was that I had to restart the Windows 2003 servers after installing the client. But that is more of a beef with Microsoft and their shitty operating systems then Jungle Disk. Their support is amazing! I had a few questions after signing up, and I kid you not, thirty seconds after I created my support ticket I already had a response from some fellow named JungleJosh. I highly recommend Jungle Disk, not only for businesses and corporate users, but also for personal (school documents, photo and video libraries) backups as well.
So I decided to install Windows Vista Ultimate via VirtualBox on my MacBook running OSX Leopard. The install went smoothly and booted into Vista and was immediately prompted with this nonsense. Honestly, 74 bloody updates? Everytime you run Windows update there is another security patch or recommend update.
According to Digg.com founder Kevin Rose, the new iPhone software update 3.0 will include “copy and paste” functionality as well as match the functionality and features offered by the rival Palm Pre phone.
The special Apple media event is scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday, March 17th) at 10am (Pacific).
Steve Jobs, who is Apples CEO, will take a medical leave of absence until the end of June. Tim Cook the COO will take over for Steve as the CEO in the interm.
Steve Jobs today sent the following email to all Apple employees:
Team,
I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.
In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.
I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.
I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.
Steve
Additionally, Tim Cook will serve as interim CEO
A new WordPress theme; iBlog was just released which is based on the popular and visually appealing Apple website. The iBlog theme was created by Andrew Powers.
The theme is basically a fixed two column layout which uses white and silver colors throughout. I just switched to the theme, and love it.
I recently heard about Mint.com from a buddy who was using it. Mint.com allows you to provide financial login, username and password, details and it will automatically pull transactions, balances, and all sorts of additional details from your various financial institutions. Then it will organize everything and provide an amazing amount of statistics, graphs, and money saving tips. At first I was very skeptical about providing any financial login details to a third party, yet alone a web application who purpose is to make a profit. As I dug further reading articles, and Googleing, I quickly realized Mint.com is very trusted company, with copious amounts of funding backed by the who’s who in silicon valley. In addition, Mint.com cannot actually complete/charge any financial transactions and they anonyomize every user, only asking for e-mail, zipcode, and a login password. After all, in reality we should be more worried about trojans and keyloggers grabbing financial institution login details then Mint.com.
So I took the big plunge, signed up, and provided my login details for my checking, savings, and major credit card accounts. Instantly, the application filled with details about my spending habits and income sources; details I never spent the time to calculate but were nonetheless eye opening and tremendously informative. $112 last month eating at Chipotle, over $300 in gasoline in November, $25 this month already at iTunes.
I spent about a good hour looking over all my transactions, properly tagging, and assigning the proper category to each charge and credit. After that, I was able to get an amazing snapshot and graph view of my spending habits, and which categories I can and furthermore need to cut back on. Finally, they have a powerful alerts feature which can send e-mails or even SMS text messages based on a variety of conditions such as a large deposit, a large withdraw, a payment due, or an interest rate changed.
Mint.com is an amazingly powerful financial tracking and planning tool, I highly recommend it. The benefits of Mint.com would be even further magnified if used by a small business, allowing the business to track income, expenses per category, and tag transactions as tax deductible. If your still unsure about security at least just sign up for an account and tinker around and browse the interface without providing any financial institutions details.
Fresh off the press is the Apple iPhone 2.2 firmware. Connect your phone to iTunes and upgrade.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/21/iphone-2-2-firmware-update-available-now/
I recently started using Field Technologies http://www.fieldtechnologies.com, a provider of GPS fleet tracking, to track two of my vehicles. They followed through with the entire process, including installing the GPS tracking devices.
The GPS devices update every 2 minutes and report data via the cellular network. I then login to the web interface to view the path, speed, heading, address, and a plethora of other metrics and information.
Their web interface is really well done, use to easy, and makes use of AJAX. I highly recommended Field Technologies.
